Government on the job for cleanup of NREG scheme

NEW DELHI: India’s flagship pro-poor programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), may be eluding the most deprived section of the rural poor.

In a major clean-up exercise, the government is surveying 5.4 crore landless casual labour to assess if they have access to the NREGS job cards. Barely a month into the survey, over 25,000 households have asked the government for enrolment in the scheme.

The number is expected to increase manifold. “No one had asked these people to enroll with NREGS before…This is our attempt at house-cleaning, ensuring that the deserving people get the benefit of the scheme,” a senior government official said.



The deprivation data of Socio and Economic Caste Census ( SECC) is being used to identify the poor households who have not been covered by NREGA.

As per the SECC, 5.4 crore households are landless, deriving a major part of their income from manual casual labour. It makes up for 30% of the total surveyed population. The expert group on SECC led by Sumit Bose had recommended that NREGS needs to be more focused towards the regions where there is greater concentration of landless labour or where people are suffering from multi-dimensional deprivation.

While NREGA is a demand driven programme, the states which have reported the highest deprivation, including Bihar and Maharashtra, do not figure in the top five recipients of funds under the scheme.

The cumulative share of the top five deprived states in NREGA funds has hovered around 32% for the last three years. The government will take into account the disparity in deciding the labour budget for 2017-18 and push the deprived states to take up more work under NREGA.

With Rs 48,000-crore allocation to the scheme in the budget earlier this month, the government has set a target of creating 5 lakh farm ponds as part of the drought proofing activity during the next financial year.

“The focus of the programme now is asset creation and weeding out any bad practices so that our system becomes more transparent and accountable,” the senior official said.

The rural development ministry would now renew the existing job cards to add the details including attested photograph, SECC temporary identification number, bank account and Aadhar number if there’s any beneficiary. The government wants to put in check the use of bogus job cards under the scheme.